What’s New in JScript for IE8 Beta 2

One of the key themes for IE8 is developer productivity. IE8 Beta 1 improved developer productivity through an optimized core scripting engine and script debugger. In this release, we continued to invest in the areas that bring more power and productivity to the web developer community. Here is a quick summary of the work that we’ve done for IE8 Beta 2:

Scripting Engine

Many enhancements have been done to the scripting engine. One feature that will bring a lot of value to the AJAX developers is the introduction of native JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). With JSON becoming the de-facto data interchange language for contemporary web applications; we have included native JSON support within the JScript engine. With this, developers can use a native JSON object to serialize and de-serialize JScript objects. This feature makes Internet Explorer 8 the first browser to support JSON natively!

Script Debugger

You have experienced the script debugger in IE8 beta 1. We’ve made it even better in IE8 beta 2. You can view script in syntax colored code similar to what you might expect in code editors such as Visual Studio™. The console shows all the script errors in a webpage at a central location. We also support the console.log mechanism to log the errors effectively. The Console is extensible for you to add your own commands through custom scripts.

Script Profiler

This is one of the new features of the IE8 Developer Tools. It will help you identify and fix performance bottlenecks in scripts so that they can run better and faster. The Script Profiler comes with an easy-to-use UI and powerful features such as ‘Call Tree View’ and ‘Export’ functionality. The Profiler output can be exported to tools like Excel so you can visualize the execution times through charts and graphs.

Does this sound interesting? Check out the JScript PM Channel 9 video to learn more. Stay tuned for more in depth details on these features in future posts.